Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To take up Deputy Nolan's point, that reduction is not due to a reduction in training. It is because the Church of Ireland College of Education, which had been separately funded, is now funded through DCU due to its incorporation there, in that it has merged into a new college operating out of St. Patrick's as part of DCU. I will get the figures for the Deputy but, to my knowledge, there is no reduction in the number being educated from year to year.

The Chairman made a good point about the investment in upskilling across the system. While we do not want to stray into matters of policy, this is an area that deserves more thought. There is a role for the training colleges, but much of the upskilling and in-service training is run through the education training centres, which recruit experts to deliver programmes. I will provide the details of the programmes that are being delivered in the mental health area and the special needs area. The Chairman is right that an investment in the area of upskilling is worthy of assessment in regard to whether we are up to best practice and what else we could do.

A positive development committee members might have read about is that we launched a postgraduate programme for principals which is to be jointly delivered by the University of Limerick, NUI Galway, UCD and Waterford Institute of Technology, WIT. It is a bit of a pillar in the ground in that it is a programme for principals at work to upskill themselves, in part through distance learning. There is a good case to be made in this regard and I will get some of the raw data for the committee.